A few days ago, returning from a business trip, I was standing in Yeager Airport waiting for my bag to surface from deep below. Not far away, a group of men stood talking. While fiddling with his laptop, one younger man said loudly “Does West Virginia have internet?” When an older member of the group said something to him, the first replied “Doesn’t matter. When I’m enunciating, they can’t understand me.”

Before moving home to West Virginia a few years ago, I lived in Durham, North Carolina for nearly 12 years. When I first moved there, it was an unwritten rule that you didn’t go downtown. They had a serious gang problem. By the time I left, downtown Durham was one of the coolest places I had ever been. There were bars, breweries, restaurants and live music everywhere.

I often write often about the positives I see in West Virginia, be it the history, the cultural legacy or the opportunity for a natural quality of life. I’m not going through life with blinders on, though. There are things here that drive me straight up the wall. Having lived in a couple other states and traveled to many more of them, I will tell you that every place has its problems and drawbacks. What it takes is the people coming together and agreeing to not put up with those problems any more. And then change comes, just like it did in Durham.

Just after the water crisis in January, a columnist wrote how West Virginians are like kidnap victims who begin to identify with their captors; they begin to think they deserve whatever treatment they get. I certainly don’t think West Virginia deserves to be treated as second class by anyone. I do think we need to do a better job of living up to our own potential. Just like Durham did.

I didn’t say anything to the guy in the airport. In some ways I regret that, but I’m confident nothing I said would have changed his mind. That’s the problem with stereotypes; they aren’t based in reality. Facts and logic don’t do much to undo them. There is a saying that “Living well is the best revenge.” It means the best way to get the better of someone who hurt you is to live like they didn’t hurt you at all. It is time we began living well. And when that happens, people from outside the state won’t even consider rehashing those tired, old stereotypes.

I wonder if the guy in the airport would be impressed to know that I typed the first draft of this column on my web-enabled smart phone?.

I used to complain (I know that’s totally out of character) that we had become a service economy. We sold clothes and trinkets made in other countries, we served food. We provided services, but we had stopped making things.

Over the last few years, companies that sent manufacturing jobs overseas started to “on-shore” them. That was a buzzword for bringing those manufacturing jobs back home. Other entrepreneurs have started making things here and are actually shipping them elsewhere.

Mike McCown is an old friend. He was a couple years ahead of me at Nitro High School, but we had mutual friends and used to run around together in our 20s. He’s a great example of what I’m talking about. Mike grew up helping his parents run the family slaughterhouse/meat packing plant in Tyler Mountain. An engineer and proud WVU grad, Mike sold tools for a while and then returned to the family business when his father got older.

When it was time to close the meat plant, Mike decided to get back into tools. He began selling, and then manufacturing a hydraulic torque wrench. Now he machines and assembles TorsionX hydraulic torque wrenches at the same Tyler Mountain location where he grew up processing meat and sells them all over the world. Just last week, he had visitors in the plant who are opening up a branch to sell his tools all over Latin America.

There are countless examples of people who have decided to do similar things. These people aren’t waiting on someone else to open doors for them. They are finding a way to do it for themselves. A huge advantage of the global economy is you can make something in West Virginia and sell it anywhere.

Many people worry that the economy still hasn’t recovered from the crash a few years ago. Honestly, it may never return to what it was. The great thing about this new economy, though, is you don’t have to be in Detroit to make cars or North Carolina to make textiles or furniture. Small, nimble shops are opening up all over the country. You can set up a business wherever you want to and still compete.

So, why aren’t we supporting small, start-up businesses that want to locate or open in West Virginia? Shouldn’t we promote quality of life? Easy access to nature? Quiet? I have no issues with trying to attract bigger businesses to come here, but everyone says small business is the backbone of the country.

If we focused on supporting homegrown business, we could change the world..

A few days ago, driving through Charleston, the same driver passed me four times between the Washington Street offramp and Montrose. Impatient and in a hurry, weaving in and out of traffic, the driver raced ahead only to get caught behind slower moving traffic. I ended up passing the person back three times, simply staying in my lane and driving. Finally, the fourth time, the driver caught a clear lane around the McCorkle Ave. exit and took off.

I know a lot of people are afraid of math problems, flashing back to high school and trying to determine when a train leaving Pittsburgh will arrive in St. Louis traveling east on Tuesdays and Fridays between noon and 2 pm so I will make this easy on you. The speed limit through that section of town is 60 miles per hour. I was traveling 60ish, maybe a mile or two above the speed limit, but not significantly. That stretch of road is slightly less than four miles.

In those four miles, going 60 miles an hour (a mile a minute), it took us approximately four minutes to get from Washington Street to Montrose. If you could average 90 miles an hour through there, which you can’t (aside from the fact that it would be highly illegal) you would get to Montrose about a minute and a half faster. In this case, probably 10 miles an hour over the speed limit, the other driver might have arrived 15 or 20 seconds earlier.

Speeding over short trips just doesn’t make sense.

Take a longer trip down the Turnpike from Charleston to the state line. That 100 mile stretch of road is a mixture of 60 and 70 mph speed limits. If you could maintain an average of 10 miles over the speed limit (which is doubtful) you’d get to Virginia about 12 minutes faster. Of course, there are stops and slow downs for traffic and tolls, so you’ll probably only make up 10 minutes.

I learned a long time ago that pushing the speed limit and racing to get places isn’t worth the stress. And I am reminded of it every time I pass someone before making an exit from the interstate, only to have them pull up behind me at the bottom of the hill. I made a lot of progress, didn’t I?

I’m not saying I don’t get in a hurry from time to time and push it on the road, (I know there are friends of mine shaking their heads that I am even writing this.) but pushing to pass other cars and accelerating ahead and then jumping on your brakes only raises your blood pressure and your gas consumption, along with the likelihood that you’ll get a ticket, while not accomplishing much in the way of saving time.

Until someone figures out a way to beam us from place to place, or travel through time to get places earlier, we are bound by the rules of physics and logic. If you have to be somewhere at a certain time, plan to arrive 15 minutes early.

Your heart will thank you..

I saw a joke the other day that said “Never underestimate the therapeutic power of driving fast with music playing really loud.” That brought a chuckle, but it also reminded me of all the times the simple joy of rolling down the windows and turning the stereo up has lightened my mood. Of course, I never exceeded the speed limit…

Last week, as part of the Creators Program at the WVSU Economic Development Center on Charleston’s West Side, Larry Groce, host and artistic director for the West Virginia Public Radio show Mountain Stage, talked about the power music has to touch us.

“On their deathbed, no one wants to hear a sermon. They want to hear a hymn.  Music speaks to us on a different level,” he said. “Nothing evokes as much emotion in three to five minutes as music. It is poetry and music combined. A song does something that takes a long time to explain in a linear fashion in a novel; rhythm, chords, and words.”

As a writer, I want to argue the point, but I really can’t. Groce played a series of songs that he identified as personal favorites. He admitted that if you asked anyone to pick their own songs, they would of course be different. His tastes tend to run toward folk music, for example, but he said he was sure if someone preferred rap or rock they could do the same thing.

Groce stood at the front of the room as he played the songs he wanted to share, transported with his eyes closed gently swaying to the sound. He played Chocktaw Bingo by James McMurtry (that was admittedly longer than most at around eight minutes) and in it the singer created characters and told the story of an extremely dysfunctional family reunion that I’m sure most of us can identify with. To write the same book, you would have to use hundreds of pages to achieve the same depth.

Some of the songs Groce played represented “the big picture” or injustices of one kind or another. He even played examples of music that made a point while making you laugh.  “These are topics that would be tough to discuss in a straight up fashion, but in a song you can do it. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a song is worth a thousand pictures,” Groce said.

I’ve always appreciated music, and the power it has. I’ve always known music could make me happy or sooth hurts. I never thought, though, about the power it has to convince or communicate.

Song writers have it so easy…(tongue firmly in cheek).

March 9 was international Good Deeds Day. It seems like there is a day for everything and everyone anymore.

I thought it was odd, though, that we have to have a day for “good deeds.” Don’t get me wrong, I applaud the effort and recognize that it is probably necessary. Everyone seems so quick to anger anymore. As kids we were all told that you “don’t discuss religion or politics.” Social media seems to have transformed that attitude to “only discuss religion or politics” and only do it when you are willing to criticize other people for their opinion and have no interest in trying to understand someone else’s thoughts on any given subject.

Without realizing it was a day set aside for good deeds, that day I helped a friend out with his website, supported another friend being ordained as a minister and then my wife and I saw a woman have a seizure and collapse outside a store. While my wife comforted the woman, I called 9-1-1 and got help on the way. My neighbor offered me the use of his log splitter and a couple days later he spent a couple hours in the yard with me moving logs and busting them up (thanks, Paul!).

The last thing I’m trying to do is hold myself up as a paragon of any virtue; quite the opposite, in fact. Too often I get wrapped up in my own little world and forget to even look up, much less do a good deed for anyone else. It does seem, though, we all spend more time worrying about what someone said or implied online than we do worrying about people down the street. Maybe that’s why news stories about someone paying for other diners’ meals or going out of their way to help each other are actually news stories and not just common events.

West Virginia has taken some bad hits in the national news over the last few months, not the least of which was a poll that indicated that West Virginia is the unhappiest state in the union (again). At this point, I’m fairly convinced our “leaders” don’t have a clue how to reverse these trends, even if they were to admit they were real. On the other hand, I’m confident that West Virginians know how to do it without any help from the government. Doing good deeds actually does more for the doer than the recipient.

My vote is we make West Virginia the “Good Deed” state and then we’ll see who has the highest level of overall well-being..